The Best Rock Album You've Never Heard

The Kinks remember The Village Green Preservation Society

Fifty years ago this month, the Kinks revolutionized rock 'n' roll. When "You Really Got Me" hit the airwaves — first in the UK, and subsequently here in America — it was like a bolt of lightning. More than the refined, finely crafted songs of the Beatles, "You Really Got Me" was as raw and immediate as had ever been heard on the radio. Its production, devoid of the reverb that soaked most records of the day, sounded great on any sound system (and still does). In just two minutes and 15 seconds, the Kinks pushed the boundaries of lyrical taste and invented distorted guitars with a proto-heavy metal sound that was as shocking in its day as the Sex Pistols were barely 12 years later.

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But then just five years later, the band's career seemed to be over.

In the face of an inexplicable ban from touring the US, the band delivered Something Else by the Kinks in 1967, which contained "Waterloo Sunset" as well as "David Watts" and lead guitarist Dave Davies's first lead vocal performance that was a major hit, "Death of a Clown," spurring talk of a solo album.

"It was a time when we felt we could do anything," Davies remembers now. "I think that's why the songs are so different. We'd learned enough about making records by that point. And the music was just so good. I remember us being a warm, happy, galvanized band."

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A remarkable statement for the always fractious Kinks, Something Else unfortunately enjoyed nowhere near the commercial success the band was used to in the UK. It fared even worse in the US.

Smarting, Dave's brother Ray Davies, the band's principal songwriter and frontman, turned inward, seeking inspiration more than ever before from the people and places around him, and the not-so-distant British music hall past, delivering The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, a masterpiece that was completely out of step with Swinging London, while at the same time being utterly timeless.

"These were rock/folk tunes," Ray Davies says now. "But it was unlike anything the Kinks had done before. We were known for 'You Really Got Me,' after all."

Devoid of any obvious singles, or any fancy production techniques like those on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, the album is a true pleasure from beginning to end, arguably running circles around the competition in both songwriting and cohesiveness, and 45 years later is more influential than ever.

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But in 1968, released the same day as the Beatles' self-titled White Album, Village Green disappeared without a trace.

"It was obscure the week it came out," Dave Davies jokes of the album. "Something Else is probably my favorite Kinks album, but Village Green was just so good. We put those songs together in our front room, and we drew really heavily on our environment and our family, who had supported us, and I think that's why it has such a distinctive English flavor and why the songs are so intimate in a way. Ray has such a great way of drawing characters. The song 'Picture Book' is like sitting in the front room looking at old photographs with your mum."

"Village Green was made at a time when we were banned from touring in America and we didn't have much airplay," Ray Davies says. "But I think the reason it's become so beloved in retrospect is that it reaches people like folk music. Not many people have the Village Green record, but many people know it. I think it's more to do with the sensibility, because it's very different to typical rock music. I wasn't worried about airplay and, whether I designed it that way or not, I reached people rather than record companies and little by little it broke through."

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Davies is right about the folky nature of the music. But it's that very simplicity that gives the album its distinctive, if utterly straightforward, sound. While other records of the time can sound dated or perhaps too precious, Village Green has always sounded fresh and accessible, a work of an immensely in-sync group at the height of its powers, while still retaining a bit of that garage edge that makes rock 'n' roll so exciting.

"Everything about it was a low-achieving record, in every sense," Ray Davies jokes. "But I intended that. We used a lot of ambient sound in recording the drums and things like that. Some people would say that made it sound like it wasn't well-produced, but that's the sound I wanted and it added to the poetic value of the record. It was designed to be that way."

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"That was a sound I was really into at the time," Dave Davies remembers. "Pete [Quaife, The Kinks' bass player] and I were trying to get the excitement of our performances on record and that's just the way it came out. On songs like 'Big Sky,' I'd think of a bass part and give it to him and he'd change it around — play off the melody, like Paul McCartney was starting to do at the time, because they both started as guitar players — and it would create something completely different and also really new-sounding."

Meanwhile, Ray was finding inspiration in unusual places.

"I was at a music industry schmooze fest and I couldn't cope with all the business talk," he says of the origin of "Big Sky." "I conceived and wrote it on the balcony of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes [France]. I know it sounds very grand. But I had to share a room with my publisher, and so out of frustration I knocked over the geranium from our fourth floor balcony and the first line of the song, 'Big sky looks down on all the people looking up at the big sky,' came to me while I was looking out from the balcony of the hotel. I was in a situation I was not happy in, so I went into this world of irony and pathos and used my imagination that one day we'll be free from all this. Because I'm sure there are lots of people like me who feel confused in a world that's going mad and you try to find a spiritual way through it. It's quite a spiritual record."

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"I knew I couldn't reach America or maybe even the radio at that time," Ray Davies admits. "So I figured, why don't I just write about people I like and situations I enjoy? But these weren't intended to be serious songs. I was just writing about the way I felt and I knew other people felt the same way."

That honesty, tinged with more than a a little nostalgia, has meant that Village Green has been able to live on through a growing number of fans and, especially, musicians.

"Village Green was one of those albums that no one bought at the time but became critically acclaimed and influential decades later," Rob Jovanovic, the author of the Kinks biography God Save the Kinks, says. "The sentiments of albums like Blur's Modern Life is Rubbish and Parklife, made nearly 30 years later, were an echo of the Kinks lamenting the loss of England's history in the 1960s."

Moreover, the stripped-down, acoustic-based sound so many bands have adopted today is directly inspired by what the Kinks did before the Band or even the Beatles.

"In the '90s, there were a lot of bands, especially in America, bands like Wilco, that discovered Village Green and tried to make their own version of it," Ray Davies says. And I think that's good to do, to make willfully low-achieving records full of messages for the insider fans."

Dave Davies, of course, has a different theory.

"I've always felt that the way we used humor to approach serious topics really set us apart, and I think Village Green has some of our best examples of that," he says. "And the way the humor was mixed with pathos was essential and very different, especially at that time. I don't think we should take life so seriously, and I've always believed that over the years people have responded to that and that's what's set the album apart."

Remarkably, these weren't songs Ray Davies labored over.

"I think the songs were with me for a long time," he says. "They were songs that I maybe had half-finished over the years but perhaps didn't think were commercial enough. But I went into a mindset that enabled me to consider these songs differently."

As for the infamous brotherly rivalry between Ray and Dave Davies that ultimately caused the implosion of the band in 1996, Dave is circumspect.

"People forget that in a family you get used to a way of acting around each other, and even a certain level of abuse. But I've seen engineers cower when Ray and I have gone at it in the recording studio, just completely unsure of what to make of it. And then it would pass and we'd carry on and they'd be completely floored that we could do that."

As for the possibility of a reunion now that the Kinks have reached that magical 50th anniversary, the Davies aren't saying much.

"I generally steer clear of talking about a reunion because everything is picked up these days by the Internet police," Ray Davies says, referring to oblique comments he made earlier this year to a possible reunion that were picked up and presented out of context (and blown out of proportion) recently by the UK press. "But my brother is a great guitar player and a great musician and I just want him to be okay."

"Ray and I are talking," Dave says, more open than one might expect. But don't get your hopes up just yet. He quickly added that "nothing's planned."

Whether a reunion ever happens, there's word of a new US label deal and an exciting series of reissues on the way. Until then, there are plenty of versions of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society to keep you company.